AWS Design Patterns at Anki

Application & systems design, deployment, provisioning and tooling for cloud services at Anki. Presented at the AdvancedAWS meetup on Jan 21, 2014 at Anki HQ.

http://www.meetup.com/AdvancedAWS/events/153714572/

Transcript

1. AWS Design Patterns at Anki Advanced AWS Meetup 1/21/2014 Ben Whaley | @iAmTheWhaley | ben@anki.com
2. Work for Anki! Anki needs beta testers!
3. • Anki and AWS • Application and Systems design • Deployment and Provisioning • Demo • Partnerships Overview
5. Services, analytics and infrastructure • Provides web & analytics services for Anki • Example services: ◦ Gameplay diagnostics ◦ Game replays ◦ Customer service platform ◦ Future Anki DRIVE enhancements
6. Application design
7. • Application processes are stateless Application design
8. • Application processes are stateless • Loose coupling among services Application design
9. • Application processes are stateless • Loose coupling among services • Configuration is in the environment Application design
10. • Application processes are stateless • Loose coupling among services • Configuration is in the environment • Built for continuous deployment Application design
11. Systems design
12. • n+2 redundancy Systems design
13. Systems design • n+2 redundancy • Compute resources are ephemeral
14. Systems design • n+2 redundancy • Compute resources are ephemeral • Managed services preferred
15. Systems design • n+2 redundancy • Compute resources are ephemeral • Managed services preferred • Infrastructure as code
16. Systems design • n+2 redundancy • Compute resources are ephemeral • Managed services preferred • Infrastructure as code • Single purpose VPCs
17. Systems design • n+2 redundancy • Compute resources are ephemeral • Managed services preferred • Infrastructure as code • Single purpose VPCs • Contract between backing resources and applications
18. Backing resources Public Web Services ELBs Infrastructure Services Bastion, NAT, CM, Metrics Private Web Services Persistence VPC External AWS Services S3, SQS, SNS Inbound requests from clients
19. Deployment and Provisioning
20. Goal: Continuous deployment Source Repo commit GitHub Web Hook Deploy Worker Old Release Remains Running Integration Tests Deploy to Integration Deploy to Production Integration tests pass SQS New Release Live Integration tests fail Notify Check for commits Commit found DNS Change
21. Deployment and Provisioning • New code, new instances
22. Deployment and Provisioning • New code, new instances • Instance store-backed AMIs built with Packer
23. • New code, new instances • Instance store-backed AMIs built with Packer • AMIs ship with base Docker containers Deployment and Provisioning
24. Deployment and Provisioning • New code, new instances • Instance store-backed AMIs built with Packer • AMIs ship with base Docker containers • Instances provisioned with Ansible
25. Userdata: 1. Sets configuration variables 2. Downloads ansible playbooks 3. Runs ansible 3-step provisioning pipeline Deploy tool: 1. Loads configuration from S3 2. Sets EC2 userdata bash script 3. Launches instances Ansible: 1. Configures supporting software 2. Downloads application code 3. Builds & runs Docker containers 4. Sends notifications
26. • Base container, service container, release container • Local dev == Production • Exceptional community • Challenges ◦ Rapidly changing ◦ Logging ◦ Debugging
27. • Uses troposphere library to create CloudFormation templates • Reusable resource templates • Saves app configuration as json files in S3 • Creates CF stacks & kicks off instance provisioning • Supports multiple deployments & releases Custom deployment tool
28. • IAM roles and policies created via CloudFormation • Intra-VPC traffic authorized by SG ID • Precise subnetting allows for future network ACLs • … some credentials still laying around in plain text On security
29. VPC Persistence Persistence Persistence RDS Multi-AZ Persistence Persistence Private Web Services Queue Processor Query Tool Persistence Persistence Public Web Services ELB Persistence Persistence Infrastructure Services Bastion NAT SQS Inbound Requests Flickr Demo App
30. Deployment Demo
31. Tooling & design limitations • Blue/Green deployment & ELB pre-warming • “Static” infrastructure templates • Higher latency for requests between VPCs • Ephemeral instance tradeoffs ◦ Slower to boot than EBS ◦ Slower to build AMIs • Incomplete functionality (for now)
33. VPC Persistence Persistence Persistence Persistence Persistence Private Web Services Persistence Persistence Public Web Services Persistence Persistence Collector Log collection and analytics
34. Credits • The 12 Factor App - http://12factor.net • Werner Vogels 2012 re:Invent Keynote • Resty - https://github.com/micha/resty • Troposphere Python cloudformation library ◦ https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere/ • Continuous deployment at Quora ◦ http://engineering.quora.com/Continuous- Deployment-at-Quora